“The GPL is Not Compatible with Itself”

A recent press conference of the Free Software
Foundation confirmed the rumours that the
GNU General Public License was
found to be incompatible with itself. This newly discovered fact may
cause a lot of disorder in the free software world, in which most
programs and libraries are licensed under this license.

Richard Stallman, chairman of the FSF, called upon developers to
immediately exempt GPL-licensed software from the GPL, as far as linking
them with GPL programs is concerned. “We have already made sure all GNU
software and every other software that is licensed to the Free Software
Foundation would be ad-hoc compatible with itself. However we need other
developers to do the same for their software”, Stallman said.

Eben Moglen, the FSF’s attorney outlined the subsequent steps that
his organization will take to overcome this crisis. The first step would be
releasing a Modified General Public License (or MGPL for short) that will
be compatible with the GPL and with itself as well as with all other
licenses that the GPL is already compatible with. It will be labelled the
GPL version 2.1, thus allowing developers to convert their software to it.
He noted that care would be taken to make sure the upcoming GPL version 3.0
will be compatible with itself, as well as the MGPL.

For the time being, though, there is an explosion of commentary, confusion
and otherwise bad temper about the newly formed situation. Eric S. Raymond,
the famous Open Source Guru notes: “This is one of the greatest
blows to the Open Source world, I have yet encountered. I have already
exempted all of my own software from the GPL in this regard, but there is a
lot of other GPLed packages out there, and many of its authors are not very
communicative.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, on the other hand, seems to find the
situation very amusing: “I said times and again, that viral licenses
such as the GPL are a bad idea, and many open-source advocates disagreed.
Now they see that even making sure one’s license is compatible with
itself, is hard to do when you open that can of worms.”

The integrity of many software projects whose license is the GPL and yet
contain works licensed by several developers is in jeopardy. The Linux kernel
is a prominent example of such a case. In a post to its mailing list, Linus
Torvalds commented that, in their case, it was not an issue. “My
interpretation of the GPL is already quite unusual, so I’ll simply rule
that I also interpret the GPL as compatible with itself.”

About

This bit was originally published on 1 April, 2002, on the iglu.org.il site.

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